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dispatches: Notes from different corners of the world.

My Lunch at Bear StearnsThe investment bank may be worth only $2 a share, but it still has an amazing salad bar.

By Dana Vachon
Posted Friday, March 21, 2008, at 2:12 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

I ask what he is hearing from Bear's management about the deal, and his future.

"Just e-mails saying you're still gonna get your check and your benefits. Also saying we have life coaches around if you want to talk about financial matters."

"Life coaches?"

"Life coaches."

Bear's universe-masters are now taking advice from life coaches. The cafeteria has a deflated feel, like a resort at the end of high season in advance of a hurricane. Our Host looks across the thin room and into the windows of JPMorgan's 270 Park Ave. headquarters, just across the way.

"Some floors know that they will be completely wiped out. Other floors may stay around. It just depends what JPMorgan wants. These were financial weapons of mass destruction," he says, alluding to Warren Buffet's famous line about derivatives. "Everything has a cloud over it right now—of fishiness."

He hasn't touched his polenta, or his asparagus, or his fettuccini.

Art of the Deal
Soon we are in an elevator going up to the 12^th floor and the executive suites. The doors open on a sumptuously carpeted, wood-paneled lobby whose walls are lined with the paintings of great 20^th-century artists.

"Jesus, there's a David Hockney," says Molton, pointing to a painting done in wild shades of pink and green and purple. "They've got a Richard Serra, and, over there—is that a Lichtenstein?"

He inspects the paintings, hanging each in some space on the wall of his mind, above a looted Barcelona chair. There are very powerful men here—or at least men who were very powerful—and none of them objects as he moves from painting to painting, commenting and appraising. For all they know we could be from Sotheby's or the JPMorgan art collection.

"This is where it all happened," says Our Host, with some disbelief, of the space in which the weekend's negotiations were held.

"We should probably get going," he continues, eager to leave this very surreal place in which the art on the walls has suddenly become worth more than some of the business lines that purchased them. Less is more.

"Can we see the trading floor?" I ask, and he agrees that we can.

The Ghost Floor
A 30-foot-long LCD screen rolls a red stream of stock quotes across the back of the trading floor, punctuated only by blips of green—the prices of rival banking stocks all trading up on the news of the federal reserve's 75-point interest-rate cut and Bear's averted bankruptcy.

The rallying share prices of Goldman and Lehman are sore reminders of what might have been for Bear's employees, of what might have been had they just held out a bit longer; Bear's traders should be cursing the ticker, throwing things at it, but as it happens, not many of them are here.

Their computer screens are dark, and their chairs are empty. A lot people are already out interviewing for new jobs. Others have opted to stay home in the comfort of their own sofas. A few try to work but seem absurd for doing so, like the Japanese soldiers they found on those islands in the '60s, still fighting the war in the Pacific.

"You see how people are standing and talking?" says Our Host. "That means they're not working. Generally, you don't see people standing like this in the middle of the day. But nobody's trading with us …"

I have never seen a place like this so sparse and quiet on a random Tuesday in March. It is disturbing just how quickly the wheels of things seize up.

I take out my BlackBerry for a portrait of this trading floor that has become something else, a negative space, but I prove a bumbling spy: I look too intently into the screen, and I wait too long to get the shot right, and by the time I am done, I have drawn the attention of the standing men, who now begin to look over at us, to wonder what we are doing here.

"We should go," says Molton Brown.

Down in the lobby we wish Our Host luck in finding a new job, in landing wherever he is to land. Molton Brown eyes the still-empty Barcelona chairs greedily, but the theft is not to be. At least, not today.